Intro­duc­tion: The sec­ond pro­gram about the Wik­iLeaks net­work high­lights the organization’s links with intel­li­gence ser­vices around the world, as well as con­nec­tions the group has with the Swedish Nazi milieu described in the late Stieg Larsson’s nov­els and the movies made from them. Wik­iLeaks receives sup­port from Pirate Bay and its asso­ci­ated Pirate Par­ties. Com­posed largely of ide­al­is­tic, rel­a­tively young hack­ers, most left of cen­ter, Pirate Bay is con­trolled by [40%] investor Carl Lund­strom, a promi­nent Swedish fascist.

John Young, one of Wik­iLeaks’ founders turned critic of the orga­ni­za­tion har­bors deep sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing the group. ” . . . they’re act­ing like a cult. They’re act­ing like a reli­gion. They’re act­ing like a gov­ern­ment.They’re act­ing like a bunch of spies. They’re hid­ing their iden­tity. They don’t account for the money. They promise all sorts of good things. They sel­dom let you know what they’re really up to. . .There was sus­pi­cion from day one that this was entrap­ment run by some­one unknown to suck a num­ber of peo­ple into a trap. So we actu­ally don’t know. But it’s cer­tainly a stan­dard coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence tech­nique. And they’re usu­ally pretty elab­o­rate and pretty care­fully run. They’ll even pros­e­cute peo­ple as part of the cover story. That actu­ally was talked about at (Sunday’s) panel. They’ll try to con­ceal who was inform­ing and betray­ing oth­ers by pre­tend­ing to pros­e­cute them. . . .” [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]. Young har­bors many other sus­pi­cions about the group as well.

Cen­tral to assess­ing Wik­iLeaks’ intel­li­gence con­nec­tions is the con­cept of the “Turned Hacker Syn­drome,” to coin a term. It is com­mon for crim­i­nal hack­ers to be “turned” after they are brought to justice–they are put to work for the author­i­ties using their skills against some of their for­mer asso­ciates and/or for the ben­e­fit of their for­mer adversaries.

Assange him­self got a wrist slap from the Aus­tralian author­i­ties after hack­ing national secu­rity data­bases main­tained by ele­ments of West­ern intel­li­gence, sug­gest­ing the dis­tinct pos­si­bil­ity that Assange was “turned” and is work­ing for one or more intel­li­gence ser­vices. In addi­tion, the WikiLeaks-associated Wau Hol­land Foun­da­tion also gives evi­dence of being a “Turned Hacker” element.

A fas­ci­nat­ing detail not included in the orig­i­nal broad­cast con­cerns the fact that Mon­ey­book­ers, the com­pany that was han­dling 0nline con­tri­bu­tions to Wik­iLeaks is a sub­sidiary of Invest­corp, a com­pany that is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the milieu of the BCCI, an intel­li­gence bank that was used for machi­na­tions in the Iran-Contra scan­dal, drug traf­fick­ing, the Afghan mujahideen sup­port effort and ter­ror­ism. Invest­corp is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with ele­ments of the Gulf elite who are con­nected to the Bush fam­ily inter­ests, as well as to the events sur­round­ing 9/11.

In remark­able fash­ion, the world of Wik­iLeaks over­laps the world por­trayed by the late Stieg Lars­son in his Mil­le­nium nov­els and the movies made from them (The Girl with the Dra­goon Tat­too, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.) In the Lars­son novels/movies, we find the inter­twin­ing of the world of com­puter hack­ers, Nazis (old and new), sex traf­fick­ing and crim­i­nal sex­u­al­ity. We find the same ele­ments in the Wik­iLeaks story. (A knowl­edge­able source famil­iar with the Swedish polit­i­cal land­scape assured author Christo­pher Hitchens that every­thing in the Lars­son novels/movies actu­ally took place!)

1. Among those who har­bor sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing the pos­si­ble involve­ment of Wik­iLeaks with ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity is one of the group’s founders, John Young (now a promi­nent critic of the group).

In addi­tion, he notes that Wik­iLeaks has behaved in a mer­ce­nary man­ner, seek­ing gen­er­ous amounts of fund­ing. Young also notes that the orga­ni­za­tion has behaved decep­tively with regard to its advi­sory board. Hav­ing him­self been the focal point of gov­ern­ment inquiries, Young is also skep­ti­cal of Assange’s accounts of being har­rassed by sin­is­ter “gov­ern­ment agents.”

Lastly, Young doesn’t think that Wik­iLeaks’ strate­gic retreat to Swe­den is likely to bear fruit–according to Young, no hacker out­fit is “takedown-proof.”

John Young was one of Wik­iLeaks’ early founders. Now he’s one of the organization’s more promi­nent crit­ics.
Young, a 74-year-old archi­tect who lives in Man­hat­tan, pub­lishes a document-leaking Web site called Cryptome.org that pre­dates Wik­iLeaks by over a decade. He’s drawn fire from Microsoft after post­ing leaked inter­nal doc­u­ments about police requests, irked the U.K. gov­ern­ment for dis­clos­ing the names of pos­si­ble spies, and annoyed Home­land Secu­rity by dis­clos­ing a review of Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion secu­rity measures.

Cryptome’s his­tory of pub­li­ciz­ing leaks–while not yield­ing to pres­sure to remove them–is what led Young to be invited to join Wik­ileaks before its launch over three years ago. He also agreed to be the pub­lic face of the orga­ni­za­tion by list­ing his name on the domain name registration.

Oper­at­ing a Web site to post leaked doc­u­ments isn’t very expen­sive (Young esti­mates he spends a lit­tle over $100 a month for Cryptome’s server space). So when other Wik­ileaks founders started to talk about the need to raise $5 mil­lion and com­plained that an ini­tial round of pub­lic­ity had affected “our del­i­cate nego­ti­a­tions with the Open Soci­ety Insti­tute and other fund­ing bod­ies,” Young says, he resigned from the effort.

In the last few weeks, after the arrest of Army intel­li­gence ana­lyst Bradley Man­ning cast a brighter spot­light on Wik­ileaks, Young has been try­ing to trace Wik­ileaks’ money flows. On July 17, Wik­ileaks asked sup­port­ers for $200,000 to pay for Man­nings’ attor­neys, even though co-founder Julian Assange said a few days ear­lier that the orga­ni­za­tion had already raised $1 million.

CNET caught up with Young at the Next HOPE hacker con­fer­ence here last week­end, where he was attend­ing the Wik­ileaks keynote speech. Fol­low­ing is a tran­script made from a recorded inter­view with Young, lightly edited for space.

Q: How many hours a day or days a week do you spend on Cryp­tome? Young: Well, it varies. When I’m doing pro­fes­sional prac­tice work, it’s very lit­tle. I just answer e-mail and when some­thing hot comes in, I’ll put it up. Most of my time is spent on my archi­tec­tural prac­tice. So I do Cryp­tome between when I have time to get to it. It’s by no means a full-time activ­ity.
What you’re doing sounds a lot like what Wik­ileaks is doing, no? Young: Only super­fi­cially, Declan, because, and we can talk more about this, I ini­tially thought that was what they were going to be doing when I first agreed to par­tic­i­pate. But it became clear right away that they were going to set up an oper­a­tion with mul­ti­ple peo­ple involved. So the first dif­fer­ence is that I don’t run an oper­a­tion. I don’t have any peo­ple work­ing on this. This is strictly–and I like the term myself, but other peo­ple hate it–it’s strictly an ama­teur version.

It’s not like Wik­ileaks and their grand goals. I’ve never had any desire to over­turn gov­ern­ments or do any of these noble things that they want to do. Or jack up jour­nal­ism. This was just a way to get cer­tain kinds of doc­u­ments out to the pub­lic.
And so when they explained the amount of money they were going to try to raise, that was the basis for part­ing com­pany with them. I thought it was going to be more like Cryp­tome, which is a col­lec­tive of peo­ple con­tribut­ing their time to it and not a cen­tral­ized oper­a­tion rais­ing lots of money. Cryp­tome is not into that kind of thing. We parted com­pany at that point. We’re still not like Wik­ileaks in that we don’t do any pro­mo­tional work for our activities.

Who were the other Wik­ileaks founders?

Young: I’m not going to talk about those. I’ll say Julian (Assange) was clearly there. I elected to con­ceal those names when I pub­lished these mes­sages. And I think it’s basi­cally a vio­la­tion of Cryptome’s policy–to pub­lish the names of peo­ple who do not want to be identified.

You had a falling-out with the other Wik­ileaks founders? Young: Yes. But it was over this: some­one said that the ini­tial goal was $5 mil­lion. That caught my atten­tion. One, because I think the type of stuff I was going to pub­lish, you should never do it for money. Only because that con­t­a­m­i­nates the cred­i­bil­ity and it turns it into a busi­ness oppor­tu­nity where there’s great treach­ery and lying going on.

And it will con­t­a­m­i­nate Wik­ileaks. It always does. In fact, that’s the prin­ci­pal means by which noble endeav­ors are con­t­a­m­i­nated, the money trail. That’s pretty obvi­ous. I hap­pen to think that ama­teur stuff is bet­ter than paid stuff.
How long were you involved before you resigned? Young: Not long. A few weeks. It wasn’t long. How­ever, one of the things that hap­pened is that some­how I got sub­scribed to that list under another name and the mes­sages kept com­ing in. I got to keep read­ing what they were say­ing about me after they booted me off. The mes­sages kept com­ing in. So I pub­lished those too.

Did they crit­i­cize you for, well, leak­ing about Wik­ileaks? Young: They cer­tainly did. They accused me of being an old fart and jeal­ous. And all these things that come up, that typ­i­cally hap­pen when some­one doesn’t like you. That’s okay. I know you would never do that and jour­nal­ists never do that, but ordi­nary peo­ple do this all the time.

Because jour­nal­ism is a noble pro­fes­sion in all its guises?

Young: That’s right. And there’s no back-biting there.
Over the years you’ve been run­ning Cryp­tome, you’ve had some encoun­ters with fed­eral agen­cies. What vis­its did you have and what were the agents con­cerned about? Young: They were most con­cerned that we pub­lished lists. The names of spies. That was the first issue that brought us to their atten­tion. There was a request, so we were told, from one of the British intel­li­gence peo­ple to have that list removed.

And did you remove it?

Young: No. And not only that, but the FBI was always very polite. They said you’ve done noth­ing ille­gal, we’re not pur­su­ing a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion. These are just cour­te­sies we’re offer­ing other gov­ern­ments. We had one with the Brits and one with the Japan­ese that brought them to our door.

You had no other inter­ac­tion with, say, Home­land Security?

Young: The other was when we started our eye­ball series of pub­lish­ing pho­tos. That brought one visit and one phone call. But again, they were polite and said there’s noth­ing ille­gal about this. They never used a neg­a­tive term. They just said the issue has been raised with us.

And by the way, I did a FOIA try­ing to get records of these vis­its, but I could never find any­thing. I did get busi­ness cards, though, and I asked for ID. They were very polite and gave me busi­ness cards and I pub­lished all that. They asked me not to pub­lish their names. But what the hell, Declan, what else do I have to go with?

So if you’ve been pub­lish­ing sen­si­tive gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion for so long, why have you not had the same encoun­ters that Wik­ileaks has had? [Ed. Note: Wik­ileaks has claimed its rep­re­sen­ta­tives have been harassed by U.S. gov­ern­ment agents.]

I don’t think they’ve had any encoun­ters. That’s bogus. But that’s okay. I know a lot of peo­ple who talk about how the government’s after them. It’s a fairly well-worn path. You know it from your own field. It remains to be seen whether any of this stuff holds up or not.

One of the tests is: unless you go to jail, it’s all bogus. When I go to jail, you’ll say he actu­ally did it, finally. He came up with some­thing that offended some­one. So far that hasn’t hap­pened, no indict­ments or any­thing. These polite vis­its are the clos­est I’ve come.

Pro­fes­sion­als are going to have noth­ing to do with Wik­ileaks, as you prob­a­bly know if you check around. Peo­ple who know secu­rity will not have any­thing to do with Wik­ileaks. But the pub­lic will.

Wik­ileaks pledges to main­tain the con­fi­den­tial­ity of sources and stressed that in the pre­sen­ta­tion over the week­end. Do you offer your con­trib­u­tors the same guarantee?

Young: No. That’s just a pitch. You can­not pro­vide any secu­rity over the Inter­net, much less any other form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We actu­ally post peri­od­i­cally warn­ings not to trust our site. Don’t believe us. We offer no pro­tec­tion. You’re strictly on your own.

We also say don’t trust any­one who offers you pro­tec­tion, whether it’s the U.S. gov­ern­ment or any­body else. That’s a story they put out. It’s repeated to peo­ple who are a lit­tle ner­vous. They think they can always find some­one to pro­tect them. No, you can’t. You’ve got to pro­tect your­self. You know where I learned that? From the cypherpunks.

So Wik­ileaks can­not pro­tect peo­ple. It’s so leaky. It’s unbe­liev­able how leaky it is as far as secu­rity goes. But they do have a lot of smoke blow­ing on their site. Page after page after page about how they’re going to pro­tect you.

And I say, oh-oh. That’s over-promising. The very over-promising is an indi­ca­tion that it doesn’t work. And we know that from watch­ing the field of intel­li­gence and how gov­ern­ments oper­ate. When they over-promise, you know they’re hid­ing some­thing. Peo­ple who are really trust­wor­thy do not go around broad­cast­ing how trust­wor­thy I am.

It sounds like you’ve become more crit­i­cal of Wik­ileaks over time.

Young: It’s not just them. It’s also that they’re behav­ing like untrust­wor­thy orga­ni­za­tions. So yes, if the shoe fits, fine.I don’t want to limit this to Wik­ileaks, but yes, they’re act­ing like a cult. They’re act­ing like a reli­gion. They’re act­ing like a gov­ern­ment. They’re act­ing like a bunch of spies. They’re hid­ing their iden­tity. They don’t account for the money. They promise all sorts of good things. They sel­dom let you know what they’re really up to. They have rit­u­als and all sorts of won­der­ful stuff. So I admire them for their show­man­ship and their enter­tain­ment value. But I cer­tainly would not trust them with infor­ma­tion if it had any value, or if it put me at risk or any­one that I cared about at risk.

Nev­er­the­less, it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ment that’s come along, to mon­e­tize this kind of thing. That’s what they’re up to. You start with free samples.

You’ve been try­ing to fol­low some of Wik­ileaks’ money flows. You con­tacted the Ger­man char­ity and posted their response. They said they’re going to have some infor­ma­tion to you per­haps in early August. Does that make you feel any bet­ter about the money trail?

Young: No. To clar­ify, they’re going to pub­lish it on their Web site. They said, “you could mir­ror it or point to it.” So it’s not just for me.

But it’s only a tiny sliver of what Wik­ileaks claims it’s raised. whether Wik­ileaks has raised a mil­lion dol­lars as they’ve claimed, or whether they’re try­ing to prime the pump, I don’t know. (Ger­man char­ity) Wal Hol­land has only han­dled a very tiny amount of this, and they’ve said that, “We know noth­ing about the rest.” . . .

. . . There was sus­pi­cion from day one that this was entrap­ment run by some­one unknown to suck a num­ber of peo­ple into a trap. So we actu­ally don’t know. But it’s cer­tainly a stan­dard coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence tech­nique. And they’re usu­ally pretty elab­o­rate and pretty care­fully run. They’ll even pros­e­cute peo­ple as part of the cover story. That actu­ally was talked about at (Sunday’s) panel. They’ll try to con­ceal who was inform­ing and betray­ing oth­ers by pre­tend­ing to pros­e­cute them. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] . . .

2. Young leaked Wik­iLeaks e-mails, which indi­cate that dis­si­dent exiles from China, Rus­sia and else­where founded the group. From this description–again, derived from Wik­iLeaks’ own e-mails, it sounds like the group is asso­ci­ated with a right-wing intel­li­gence network–one that is also will­ing to work against U.S. inter­ests. Among the ele­ments that should be con­sid­ered in this regard are the UNPO and the Safari Club. It appears that Assange imag­ined that he would be able to fleece CIA and West­ern intel­li­gence services.

“1. WL was founded by Chi­nese dis­si­dents, math­e­mati­cians and startup com­pany tech­nol­o­gists, from the US, Tai­wan, Europe, Aus­tralia and South Africa.

1.1 Our advi­sory board, which is still form­ing, includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives from expat Russ­ian and Tibetan refugee com­mu­ni­ties, reporters, a for­mer US intel­li­gence ana­lyst and cryptographers.

2. There are cur­rently 22 peo­ple directly involved in the project.

3. We haven’t sought pub­lic feed­back so far, but dis­si­dent com­mu­ni­ties have been been very gra­cious with their assistance.”

J. We are going to fuck them all. Chi­nese mostly, but not entirely a feint. Inven­tion abounds. Lies, twists and dis­torts every­where needed for pro­tec­tion. Hack­ers mon­i­tor Chi­nese and other intel as they bur­row into their tar­gets, when they pull, so do we.

Inex­haustible sup­ply of mate­r­ial. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We’re going to crack the world open and let it flower into some­thing new. If fleec­ing the CIA will assist us, then fleece we will. We have pull­backs from NED, CFR, Free­dom­house and other CIA teats. We have all of pre 2005 Afghanistan. Almost all of India fed. Half a dozen for­eign min­istries. Dozens of polit­i­cal par­ties and con­sulates, World­bank, apec, UN sec­tions, trade groups, Tibet and Fulan Dafa asso­ci­a­tions and… Russ­ian phish­ing mafia who pull data every­where. We’re drown­ing. We don’t even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped stor­ing it at 1Tb.”

3. As dis­cussed in FTR #724, Wik­iLeaks has been col­lect­ing funds (in part) through the Wau Hol­land Foun­da­tion in Berlin. (The foun­da­tion has indi­cated that the group’s fundrais­ing is fairly mysterious–they have claimed to be rais­ing money for the defense of Bradley Man­ning (the appar­ent source of the “Col­lat­eral Mur­der” doc­u­ments). Yet it appears that they haven’t allo­cated any funds for that purpose.

One of the things that is note­wor­thy about the Wau Hol­land Foun­da­tion is the organization’s appar­ent links to the Ger­man intel­li­gence service–the BND. Cen­tral to under­stand­ing this pro­gram is the con­cept of what–for lack of a bet­ter term– could be called “Turned Hacker Syndrome.”

Fre­quently, hack­ers who have been “taken down” are “turned”–they are put to work for the very gov­ern­ments against whose laws they have trans­gressed. The pos­si­bil­ity that the CCC may have been “turned” is one to be seri­ously considered.

. . . Twenty years later, the CCC now has to con­tinue with­out its hon­orary pres­i­dent Wau Hol­land, also known as Her­wart Holland-Moritz. Hol­land suf­fered a stroke in late May and fell into a coma; he died Sun­day morn­ing, age 49. . . . Hol­land taught his fel­low CCCers to never hack for profit, to always
be open about what they were up to, and to fight for an open
infor­ma­tion soci­ety. He was deeply embar­rassed when some CCCers sold
their dis­cov­er­ies from within the U.S. mil­i­tary com­puter net­work to
the KGB. This inci­dent and the sub­se­quent dis­cus­sions in the club
brought the next gen­er­a­tion to the CCCs helm.

While the new lead­er­ship has a less strict moral­is­tic, more post­mod­ern
sense of hack­ing, it remains true to the CCCs polit­i­cal objec­tives.
Hol­land became the clubs hon­orary pres­i­dent. Under his stew­ard­ship,
the CCC gained con­sid­er­able sta­tus in Ger­man pol­i­tics, with its
speak­ers invited by the par­lia­ment, tele­coms firms, banks and even the
secret service . . .

4. Assange him­self may be some­thing of a “turned hacker.” Is he con­nected to Aus­tralian intel­li­gence, as he claims? Is an ele­ment of that con­nec­tion the wrist slap he received for his crim­i­nal hack­ing in Australia?

. . . Pro­gram­ming quickly became hack­ing once Assange got an Inter­net con­nec­tion, and soon he was access­ing gov­ern­ment net­works and bank main­frames. He was arrested in 1991 and charged with more than 30 crim­i­nal counts related to his hack­ing. Fac­ing as many as 10 years in prison, Assange struck a plea deal.

Dur­ing sen­tenc­ing, the judge ruled that Assange only had to pay a fine. Assange’s hacks were not mali­cious; they were the harm­less result of “inquis­i­tive intel­li­gence,” said the judge. . . .

5. Assange has claimed he was warned by “Aus­tralian intel­li­gence” that the “Pen­ta­gon” would try to dis­credit him.

A top Swedish pros­e­cu­tor said on Wednes­day she was reopen­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion into rape alle­ga­tions against Julian Assange, the founder of whistle­blow­ing web­site WikiLeaks.

…Assange has denied the charges, which a lower offi­cial had with­drawn two weeks ago, and said he has been warned by Aus­tralian intel­li­gence that he could face a cam­paign to dis­credit him after leak­ing the doc­u­ments. . . . [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

6. Recall that in FTR #724, we exam­ined Assange’s rela­tion­ship with “The Fam­ily,” which has appar­ent con­nec­tions to Aus­tralian intel­li­gence. (Well-connected beyond any­thing one could sup­pose from “coin­ci­dence” in the civil­ian sec­tor, the cult cared for Lord Casey, the Aus­tralian gov­ern­men­tal min­is­ter in charge of over­see­ing the Aus­tralian intel­li­gence ser­vice.) Although Assange dis­misses his rela­tion­ship to the group as hav­ing spent years flee­ing with his mother from the group’s attempts at seiz­ing his half-brother, this “flight” entailed his mother repeat­edly seek­ing refuge in the same places and telling friends what she was doing and where she was doing it.

Was this “flight” actu­ally part of the cre­ation of a “legend”–a plau­si­bly deni­able cover for intel­li­gence work? It should be noted that the group repeat­edly caught up with Assange and his mother. Was Assange tip­ping them off? Was this part of the cover all along? Might this have been intended to explain any future, poten­tially trou­ble­some eye­wit­ness accounts of con­tact between the group, Assange and his mother?

The pos­si­bil­ity that this story involves the cre­ation of a “leg­end” is not one to be too read­ily cast aside.

Assange’s strange white/platinum/blonde hair is a sub­ject of inter­est. Char­ac­ter­is­tic of chil­dren raised in the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult, the ori­gins of that odd coif are explained by his mother as stem­ming from yet another child cus­tody case. Sup­pos­edly, his hair turned white because of the trauma of repeated court appear­ances in con­nec­tion with attempts at gain­ing cus­tody of his daugh­ter. Is this part of the cre­ation of a leg­end, as well. It appears that Assange dies his hair–as illus­trated above and at right.

. . . In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hear­ings and appeals, Assange worked out a cus­tody agree­ment with his wife. Claire told me, “We had expe­ri­enced very high lev­els of adren­a­line, and I think that after it all fin­ished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like com­ing back from a war. You just can’t inter­act with nor­mal peo­ple to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated.” Not long after the court cases, she said, Assange’s hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all color. . .

7. Inter­est­ingly, and sig­nif­i­cantly, it was while “on the run” from the Hamilton-Byrne cult that Assange began his hack­ing career. It should be noted that his hacks involved tar­gets that would cer­tainly have placed him on the radar screen of West­ern intel­li­gence! Again, was the wrist-slap he received symp­to­matic of “Turned Hacker Syndrome”?

. . . While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an elec­tron­ics shop. Assange would go there to write pro­grams on a Com­modore 64, until Claire bought it for him, mov­ing to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known pro­grams, where he found hid­den mes­sages left by their creators. . . .

. . . He joined with two hack­ers to form a group that became known as the Inter­na­tional Sub­ver­sives, and they broke into com­puter sys­tems in Europe and North Amer­ica, includ­ing net­works belong­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. . . .

8. The con­clu­sion of the pro­gram high­lights the group’s cur­rent place of operations–Sweden–and the cir­cum­stances under which they arrived in that nation.

Wik­iLeaks has been tout­ing Swe­den as a safe base of operations–for those who would work with them. Wik­iLeaks co-founder and critic John Young says that Wik­iLeaks’ assur­ances of secu­rity are illusory.

BBC: What do you think about Wik­ileaks being based in a coun­try which will pro­tect it from takedown.

Cryp­tome: There is no place where a take­down can­not occur. The dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem for com­mu­ni­ca­tion can always be blocked and servers con­fis­cated. Only mul­ti­ple, grow­ing and chang­ing pub­lic out­lets for pro­hib­ited infor­ma­tion can offer a chance of avoid­ing shut­down, demo­niza­tion, cor­rup­tion through finance and bribery and orches­trated distrust. . . .

Note that Lund­strom sold his fam­ily busi­ness to the San­doz com­pany. Part of the old I.G. Far­ben com­plex, it is the firm that devel­oped LSD and, accord­ing to Sarah Moore, pro­vided it gratis to the Hamilton-Byrne cult. Note that the ele­ments of the old I.G. Far­ben firm have coa­lesced into an essen­tial ele­ment of the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work, the eco­nomic com­po­nent of the Under­ground Reich.

A Swedish Inter­net com­pany linked to file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay says it’s help­ing online whistle-blower Wik­iLeaks release clas­si­fied doc­u­ments from servers located in a Stock­holm sub­urb. Mikael Viborg, the owner of the Web host­ing com­pany PRQ, on Fri­day showed The Asso­ci­ated Press the site — the base­ment of a drab office build­ing — in Solna on the con­di­tion that the exact loca­tion was not revealed.

“This is the office. The server room is fur­ther inside,” the 28-year-old Viborg said, with the door to the office cracked open. Desks with com­put­ers, doc­u­ments, and empty pas­try boxes and soda cans could be seen inside before he closed the door.

Wik­iLeaks posted more than 76,900 clas­si­fied mil­i­tary and other doc­u­ments, mostly raw intel­li­gence reports from Afghanistan, on its web­site July 25. The White House angrily denounced the leaks, say­ing they put the lives of Afghan infor­mants and U.S. troops at risk.

The secre­tive web­site gives few details about its setup, but says its “servers are dis­trib­uted over mul­ti­ple inter­na­tional juris­dic­tions and do not keep logs. Hence these logs can­not be seized.” . . .

9b. Ulti­mately, Pirate Bay was sold to Swedish gam­ing firm GGF. (It ulti­mately appears that the deal wasn’t con­sum­mated due to the bank­ruptcy of GGF. Pirate Bay, in turn, is con­trolled by an off­shore entity called Reservella, reg­is­tered in the Seychelles.)

The ulti­mate motive for a fas­cist like Lund­strom to fund Pirate Bay is, obvi­ously, a mat­ter of spec­u­la­tion. One pos­si­bil­ity to be con­sid­ered is the Serpent’s Walk sce­nario, with the Under­ground Reich gain­ing con­trol of all world media. (This is dis­cussed at greater length in the long For The Record series about Ger­man Cor­po­rate Con­trol of U.S. media. Recall BMG’s alliance with Nap­ster in the early part of the decade. Might Lund­strom have been groom­ing Pirate Bay for cor­po­rate takeover by an Under­ground Reich entity?)

The lucra­tive com­mer­cial­iza­tion of Nap­ster may well have been one of the inspi­ra­tions for GGF’s takeover of Pirate Bay.

Global Gam­ing Fac­tory (GGF) has paid 60m kro­nor (£4.7m) to take over the site from its founders.

Once it has taken con­trol, GGF said it would start pay­ing copy­right fees for the movies, music and games linked to via the site. . . .

9c. In that same con­text, it is worth not­ing that the quasi-populist ide­o­log­i­cal rhetoric sur­round­ing Pirate Bay dove­tails nicely with the sort of “fas­cist pop­ulism” mar­keted by the polit­i­cal par­ties financed by Lundstrom.

. . . The money man, Carl Lund­ström, on whose servers The Pirate Bay [and WikiLeaks–D.E.] was housed, is straight out of the crime nov­els of Stieg Lars­son. He inher­ited a for­tune built on crisp­bread, and has a long his­tory of involve­ment with extreme rightwing pol­i­tics. In the 1980s, he was a mem­ber of “Keep Swe­den Swedish”, an anti-immigrant fringe group; he has finan­cially backed the Swe­den Democ­rats, a would-be pop­ulist and anti-immigrant party; and only this month the man­ag­ing direc­tor of one of his com­pa­nies was charged with a rob­bery in a small west-coast town, part of a feud within a neo-Nazi group. Lund­ström told the Metro news­paper (http://bit.ly/metro) after he sacked the man that he had known he was a party mem­ber, but not that he had gone to col­lect another member’s com­puter with a sub­ma­chine gun.

Got­tfrid Svartholm Varg and Fred­erik Neij, the nerds who run The Pirate Bay itself, have also been accused by the pros­e­cu­tor of tax eva­sion, but deny that they were mak­ing any money from their busi­ness. Their atti­tude of sneer­ing enti­tle­ment towards the gov­ern­ment is all of a piece with their atti­tude towards the big con­tent companies. . . .

. . . I know that a lit­tle bit of the rhetoric around The Pirate Bay sounds left­wing – the idea that it is wrong for “inter­na­tional cap­i­tal” to push Swe­den around – but that’s just pop­ulist, and could be found in the rhetoric of the kind of par­ties that Carl Lund­ström has sup­ported too.

The over­whelm­ing impres­sion is of a clash between two rightwing views, one that says it is all right to steal from the state, and one which says it is sin­ful to steal from corporations. . . .

9d. Inter­est­ingly, and per­haps sig­nif­i­cantly, the pur­chase of Pirate Bay by GGF took place the same week as the death of Michael Jack­son. In FTR #695, we exam­ined his untimely demise against the back­ground of Bertelsmann’s re-entry into the music busi­ness and Michael Jackson’s own­er­ship of the highly lucra­tive Bea­t­les cat­a­log. Might the two events have been linked–part of the Under­ground Reich’s bid to increase its pres­ence in the music business?

Just before GGF’s pur­chase of Pirate Bay, the stock increased dra­mat­i­cally in price, caus­ing many to spec­u­late that insider trad­ing may have been involved.

There have been two big music-business news sto­ries in the past week. One has been – and still is – dom­i­nat­ing all media out­lets, and the other pretty much snuck in under the radar.

The biggest story, of course, was the death of Michael Jack­son and the result­ing can­cel­la­tion of his 50 gigs at the O2. . .

. . . There are reports that sub­scribers are clos­ing their accounts, and GGF is fac­ing an insider-trading inves­ti­ga­tion after its stock saw a huge upswing in trades on Mon­day – the day before the deal was announced. . . .

9e. Lund­strom is alleged to have sug­gested mov­ing Pirate Bay’s oper­a­tions to Argentina–certainly a hos­pitable place for a poten­tial Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work busi­ness enterprise!

. . . . The paper also talks about knowl­edge on Lundstrom’s side about poten­tial legal ram­i­fi­ca­tions. Pros­e­cu­tors say Lud­strom per­son­ally sent an SMS to Fredrik Neij on May 31st of 2006 to warn him about the raids against The Bay and its own­ers. Lund­strom sup­pos­edly also sug­gested in an email to move The Pirate Bay’s oper­a­tions to Argentina. . . .

. . . . Maybe more wor­ry­ing; it’s still unclear who’s the own­ers of The Pirate Bay. There’s no com­pany with the name The Pirate Bay reg­is­tered in Swe­den. Accord­ing to GGF’s legal advi­sor Per Eric Alvs­ing, The Pirate Bay is owned by a com­pany in the Sey­chelles, called Reservella, Dagens Indus­tri writes. But he doesn’t know who’s the owner of Reservella. . . .

In remark­able fash­ion, the world of Wik­iLeaks inter­sects with the world por­trayed by the late Stieg Lars­son in his Mil­le­nium nov­els and the movies made from them (The Girl with the Dra­goon Tat­too, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.) In the Lars­son novels/movies, we find the inter­twin­ing of the world of com­puter hack­ers, Nazis (old and new), sex traf­fick­ing and crim­i­nal sex­u­al­ity. We find the same ele­ments in the Wik­iLeaks story.

Author Christo­pher Hitchens described the political/social envi­ron­ment por­trayed by Lars­son. Note that Lars­son was the focal point of death threats and plots by Swedish Nazis, and that some­one famil­iar with the Swedish polit­i­cal and legal scene said that every­thing Lars­son wrote about actu­ally hap­pened! Fur­ther­more, Lars­son died on the anniver­sary of Die Krys­tall­nacht (Novem­ber 9th), a very impor­tant date in the Nazi world view. His strate­gi­cally timed heart attack should be pon­dered in light of the Swedish Nazi milieu’s links to that country’s intel­li­gence ser­vices. Such ele­ments can sim­u­late an appar­ent heart attack very easily.

. . . In the Lars­son uni­verse the nasty trolls and hulk­ing ogres are bent Swedish cap­i­tal­ists, cold-faced Baltic sex traf­fick­ers, blue-eyed Viking Aryan Nazis, and other Nordic riffraff who might have had their rea­sons to whack him. . . His best excuse for his own pruri­ence is that these ser­ial killers and tor­ture fanciers are prac­tic­ing a form of cap­i­tal­ism and that their racket is pro­tected by a porno­graphic alliance with a form of Fas­cism, its lower ranks made up of hideous bik­ers and meth run­ners. This is not just sex or crime—it’s politics! . . .

And this is not the only murk that hangs around his death, at the age of 50, in 2004.

To be exact, Stieg Lars­son died on Novem­ber 9, 2004, which I can’t help notic­ing was the anniver­sary of Kristall­nacht. Is it plau­si­ble that Sweden’s most pub­lic anti-Nazi just chanced to expire from nat­ural causes on such a date? Larsson’s mag­a­zine, Expo, which has a fairly clear fic­tional cous­in­hood with “Mil­len­nium,” was an unceas­ing annoy­ance to the extreme right. He him­self was the pub­lic fig­ure most iden­ti­fied with the unmask­ing of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tions, many of them with a hard-earned rep­u­ta­tion for homi­ci­dal vio­lence. The Swedes are not the pacific her­bi­vores that many peo­ple imag­ine: in the foot­notes to his sec­ond novel Lars­son reminds us that Prime Min­is­ter Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the for­eign min­is­ter Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stock­holm depart­ment store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the ver­dict in the sec­ond case has by no means sat­is­fied everybody.

A report in the main­stream news­pa­per Afton­bladet describes the find­ings of another anti-Nazi researcher, named Bosse Schön, who unrav­eled a plot to mur­der Stieg Lars­son that included a Swedish SS vet­eran. Another scheme mis­fired because on the night in ques­tion, 20 years ago, he saw skin­heads with bats wait­ing out­side his office and left by the rear exit. Web sites are devoted to fur­ther spec­u­la­tion: one blog is pre­oc­cu­pied with the the­ory that Prime Min­is­ter Palme’s uncaught assas­sin was behind the death of Lars­son too. Larsson’s name and other details were found when the Swedish police searched the apart­ment of a Fas­cist arrested for a polit­i­cal mur­der. Larsson’s address, tele­phone num­ber, and pho­to­graph, along with threats to peo­ple iden­ti­fied as “ene­mies of the white race,” were pub­lished in a neo-Nazi mag­a­zine: the author­i­ties took it seri­ously enough to pros­e­cute the editor. . . .

Still, I have attended demon­stra­tions by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly fright­en­ing. I also know some­one with excel­lent con­tacts in the Swedish police and secu­rity world who assures me that every­thing described in the ‘Mil­len­nium’ nov­els actu­ally took place. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] And, appar­ently, Lars­son planned to write as many as 10 in all. So you can see how peo­ple could think that he might not have died but been ‘stopped.’” . . .

11. In Swe­den, Assange his been charged with “molesta­tion,” a sex­ual harass­ment offense.

A top Swedish pros­e­cu­tor
said on Wednes­day she was reopen­ing an
inves­ti­ga­tion into rape alle­ga­tions against
Julian Assange, the founder of whistle­blow­ing
web­site WikiLeaks.

Wik­iLeaks pub­lished more than 70,000 secret
mil­i­tary files on Afghanistan in July in what U.
S. offi­cials have called one of the biggest
secu­rity breaches in U.S. mil­i­tary history.

Assange has denied the charges, which a
lower offi­cial had with­drawn two weeks ago,
and said he has been warned by Australian

intel­li­gence that he could face a cam­paign to
dis­credit him after leak­ing the documents.

Nei­ther Assange nor his lawyer could be
imme­di­ately reached for comment.

Direc­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions Mar­i­anne Ny
said she decided to reopen the inves­ti­ga­tion
after fur­ther review of the case.

“There is rea­son to believe that a crime has
been com­mit­ted. Con­sid­er­ing infor­ma­tion
avail­able at present, my judg­ment is that the
clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the crime is rape,” Ny said in a
state­ment on the Pros­e­cu­tion Authority’s
website.

“More inves­ti­ga­tions are nec­es­sary before a
final deci­sion can be made,” she added. She

also said a pre­lim­i­nary inves­ti­ga­tion into
charges of molesta­tion would be expanded to
sex­ual coer­cion and sex­ual molestation.

“The case has a high pri­or­ity,” she told
Reuters. She declined to say whether Assange
had already been ques­tioned or give fur­ther
information.

Alle­ga­tions of rape and molesta­tion were
brought against Assange, an Aus­tralian
cit­i­zen, two weeks ago.

The more seri­ous charge was dropped almost
imme­di­ately, though pros­e­cu­tors con­tin­ued to
look into the molesta­tion charge. . . .

12. The PRQ server (which serves Pirate Bay and Wik­iLeaks and is largely financed by Nazi lumi­nary Carl Lund­strom) also serves a site that caters to pedophiles, who use it to “groom” poten­tial partners.

One ques­tion that sug­gests itself con­cerns the sex­ual abuse to which chil­dren of “The Fam­ily” were sub­jected (see FTR #724.) Is there any rela­tion­ship between the sys­tem­atic sex­ual abuse of chil­dren by the Hamilton-Byrne cult and the charges lev­eled against Assange? In turn, is there any link between those con­sid­er­a­tions and the Nazi-linked PRQ’s host­ing of both Wik­iLeaks and a pedophile site?

About the pedophile site:

Despite a new law designed to tackle groom­ing of young peo­ple by sus­pected pae­dophiles on inter­net web­sites, police are unable to act against those host­ing chat forums, con­tact sites and advice pages.

“The so-called groom­ing law which came into force last July for­bids sex­u­ally moti­vated con­tact with chil­dren over the inter­net. But the adult has to take some sort of ini­tia­tive in that con­tact for it to be an offence — to arrange a date, buy a train ticket or such like,” said Jonas Pers­son of the Swedish police to The Local on Friday.

In the six months after the law was adopted the police received only 100 reports, despite the fact that more than half of Swedish girls aged 15 to17 claimed to have been sub­ject to groom­ing attempts by adults over the inter­net before reach­ing the age of 15, accord­ing to a National Coun­cil for Crime Pre­ven­tion (Brotts­före­byg­gan­derådet — Brå) report from 2007.

The law does not allow for the clo­sure of web­sites or the pros­e­cu­tion of those behind them. Jonas Pers­son explained why:

“I don’t think a tight­en­ing of the leg­is­la­tion is desir­able — it would come dan­ger­ously close to encroach­ing on free­dom of expres­sion leg­is­la­tion,” he said.

Legal oblig­a­tions for those behind web­sites vis­ited by sus­pected pae­dophiles and would-be “groomers” extend only to the removal of pic­tures and films which fea­ture minors, or the pub­li­ca­tion of per­sonal information.

The Local has received infor­ma­tion that a man res­i­dent in Stock­holm is alleged to be behind a chat forum serv­ing as a con­tact point for pae­dophiles and hosted by PRQ — a Swedish web-hosting firm run by Pirate Bay co-founders Got­tfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij, and also noted for host­ing the Wik­ileaks whistle-blower web­site. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

Anti-paedophilia activists claim to have made attempts to per­suade PRQ to close the man’s web­site but to no avail. . . .

13a. Pirate Bay over­laps and is closely asso­ci­ated with a polit­i­cal party–The Pirate Party–that has branches in Swe­den, Switzer­land and Ger­many, among other coun­tries. The Swedish Pirate Party is help­ing spon­sor Wik­iLeaks’ pres­ence in the coun­try, help­ing to pro­vide them with a for­mer under­ground nuclear shel­ter for an oper­at­ing base.

One of the world’s most con­tro­ver­sial web­sites now has one of the world’s coolest dat­a­cen­ters.
Andy Green­berg at Forbes has picked up on a Nor­we­gian report that Wik­ileaks‘ servers are now hosted in Sweden’s Pio­nen dat­a­cen­tre, housed inside a Cold War-era under­ground nuclear bunker. 30 metres below Stock­holm, it report­edly has a sin­gle entrance with half-metre thick metal doors.

The move has been ini­ti­ated by the Swedish Pirate Party, who began look­ing after Wik­ileaks’ host­ing this month. “We have long admired Wik­ileaks”, the Pirate Party’s Rick Falkvinge told Norway’s VG, claim­ing that as his party is host­ing Wik­ileaks, an attack on Wik­ileaks is also regarded as an attack on a polit­i­cal party. . . .

13b. After Wik­iLeaks was the focal point of DOS and hack­ing attacks in Novem­ber of 2010, the Swiss Pirate Party under­took to access Wik­iLeaks’ material.

. . . . On Fri­day, the Pirate Party of Switzer­land — part of an inter­na­tional move­ment fight­ing for the free shar­ing of online con­tent — said it owned the “wikileaks.ch” domain name and was happy to sup­port WikiLeaks.

“I don’t see an oppor­tu­nity for a for­eign gov­ern­ment to reach into Switzer­land,” said Leenaars. “This is a very forward-looking move.” . . .

13c. A start-up owned by a co-founder of the Swedish Pirate Bay (a con­trol­ling inter­est in which is owned by Swedish fas­cist Carl Lund­strom) remains as a con­duit for dona­tions for WikiLeaks.

While major online financ­ing ser­vices such as Pay­Pal, Mas­ter­Card, and Visa have shut down their deal­ings with the embat­tled Wik­iLeaks, one micro­fi­nanc­ing startup is still hang­ing on. Flattr, a micro­pay­ment startup cre­ated by Peter Sunde, co-founder of the infa­mous Bit­Tor­rent shar­ing site The Pirate Bay, still accepts dona­tions on behalf of the document-leaking non-profit. . . .

. . . Sunde has been a pub­lic advo­cate for Assange and Wik­iLeaks. He has also pro­posed a peer-to-peer DNS sys­tem that would pre­vent domain name reg­is­tra­tions from being revoked, as was done with the WikiLeaks.org domain. . . .

The hacker friendly web­site 4chan has begun to orga­nize its mem­bers, known col­lec­tively as Anony­mous, in an effort to pre­vent “the oppres­sive future which looms ahead.” The “Oper­a­tion Avenge Assange” will con­sist of a series of Inter­net attacks that have begun with PayPal.

Julian Assange is a man who has made ene­mies. The editor-in-chief and cre­ator of Wik­iLeaks is fight­ing bat­tles on all fronts: legally, finan­cially, per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally, and even now sits in a jail cell in Eng­land fol­low­ing his arrest ear­lier today, after Swe­den issued an arrest war­rant stem­ming from four charges of sex­ual offences, includ­ing one of rape. But Assange is not with­out his allies, either. One of the more poten­tially pow­er­ful groups to throw in its sup­port is the web­site 4chan, and its some of its mem­bers that are col­lec­tively known as Anony­mous. The group that is either famous or infa­mous depend­ing on your point of view, have begun a new cam­paign to sup­port Wik­iLeaks and its cre­ator that they are call­ing “Oper­a­tion Avenge Assange”.

Oper­a­tion Avenge Assange is a sys­tem­atic attack that will tar­get groups that Anony­mous has deemed to have essen­tially treated Assange unfairly. The first tar­get on the list is Pay­Pal, which reports that cyber attacks have already begun. . . .

For­mer par­lia­men­tar­ian Jörg Tauss, the most promi­nent mem­ber of the Ger­man Pirate Party, has resigned from the party fol­low­ing his con­vic­tion for pos­sess­ing child pornog­ra­phy last week.

Two days after the Karl­sruhe dis­trict court handed the 56-year-old a 15-month sus­pended sen­tence, Tauss said on Sun­day that he would leave the party to avoid dam­ag­ing its rep­u­ta­tion, say­ing his pres­ence would be “counterproductive.”

“We must be able to dis­cuss our issues at our infor­ma­tion stands and should not allow our­selves to be crip­pled by the ‘Tauss debate.’ For this rea­son I declare my exit from the party,” the politi­cian said Sun­day on his blog, insist­ing he would still sup­port the party. . . .

15. Although Wik­iLeaks has gar­nered pub­lic­ity for its osten­si­ble anti­war leaks, “pro­gres­sives” have quickly for­got­ten that the group leaked the doc­u­ments which proved to be the foun­da­tion of an attempt to dis­credit the notion of global warming.

. . . Though Assange’s most recent, well-known projects have had an anti­war bent – the recent Afghan war leaks, the infa­mous “col­lat­eral mur­der” video of a US heli­copter crew gun­ning down a group that included two Reuters jour­nal­ists in Iraq – his site does not appear to have an obvi­ous ide­ol­ogy beyond expos­ing secrets.

In other projects, Assange pub­lished a trove of text mes­sages sent in the US on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, and e-mails from the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia’s Cli­mate Research Unit, which led many to believe that sci­en­tists were sup­press­ing anti-global warm­ing research and results. . . .

16. Recently deceased, Nobel-Prize win­ning cli­ma­tol­o­gist Pro­fes­sor Stephen Schnei­der of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity was receiv­ing death threats from Neo-Nazis. These are the same kind of ele­ments that were threat­en­ing the life of the late Stieg Lars­son before he, too, died of an appar­ent heart attack.

Were both men mur­dered? Might some of the Nazi/intelligence/industrialist links have man­i­fested them­selves in both instances?

Stephen H. Schnei­der, a Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity biol­o­gist on the van­guard of climate-change research for four decades, who argued elo­quently on human cul­pa­bil­ity in global warm­ing and will­ingly threw him­self into the polit­i­cal fray to explain and defend the sci­en­tific evi­dence, has died. He was 65. . . .Schnei­der had a heart attack Mon­day while fly­ing to Lon­don from a sci­ence meet­ing in Stock­holm, accord­ing to Stan­ford spokesman Dan Sto­ber. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] . . .

. . . . San­ter and Schnei­der were among the sci­en­tists who served on the inter­na­tional panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore, who in a state­ment Mon­day called Schnei­der a “pro­lific researcher and author … and a won­der­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tor” whose con­tri­bu­tions to the advance­ment of cli­mate sci­ence will be “sorely missed.” . . .

. . . He [Schnei­der] said he had received hun­dreds of abu­sive e-mails from crit­ics, par­tic­u­larly since the Copen­hagen cli­mate change sum­mit in Decem­ber. A few weeks ago he told the Lon­don Guardian news­pa­per that his name was among those of sev­eral cli­ma­tol­o­gists that appeared ear­lier this year on a death list on a neo-Nazi web­site [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]. . .

17. Wik­iLeaks’ has been col­lect­ing money through a sub­sidiary of Invest­corp, con­trolled by the Gulf elite, includ­ing ele­ments tied to the Saudi elite, Al Qaeda and the Mus­lim Brotherhood.

The whistle­blow­ing group Wik­iLeaks claims that it has had its fund­ing blocked and that it is the vic­tim of finan­cial war­fare by the US government.

Mon­ey­book­ers, a British-registered inter­net pay­ment com­pany that col­lects Wik­iLeaks dona­tions, emailed the organ­i­sa­tion to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an offi­cial US watch­list and on an Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment blacklist. . . .

. . . . Mon­ey­book­ers, which is reg­is­tered in the UK but con­trolled by the Bahrain-based group Invest­corp, would not make any­one avail­able to explain the deci­sion. Its pub­lic rela­tions firm, 77PR, said: “We have never had any request, inquiry or cor­re­spon­dence from any author­ity regard­ing this for­mer cus­tomer.” Asked how this could be rec­on­ciled with the ref­er­ences in the cor­re­spon­dence to a black­list, it said: “We stick with our orig­i­nal statement.” . . .

Invest­corp isn’t your every­day invest­ment com­pany. It merely works with the very rich, prefer­ably from the middle-east. In 2005 its port­fo­lio is val­ued at 8.6 bil­lion dollars.

If we would be really accu­rate we would call Invest­corp a lever­aged buy-out com­pany. It’s WALLSTREET all over. Invest­corp holds dif­fer­ent funds to which you — not you, but they, the very rich — can sub­scribe. Invest­corp then puts the com­pa­nies it acquires into these funds and imme­di­ately has its money back (with a profit for the real share­hold­ers of Investcorp).

Accord­ing to Time Mag­a­zine, Invest­corp is known to have worked the books in the nine­tees, mak­ing a los­ing com­pany look like a profitmaker.

Nemir Kir­dar is pres­i­dent and CEO. Forbes puts him at num­ber 206 on the Rich List. His excel­lency Abdul-Rahman Al-Ateequ, ex-minister of oil and finance of Kuwait, advi­sor to the emir of Bahrain and the first ambas­sador of Kuwait to the U.S.A. has been Chair­man since the start of the invest­ment com­pany. Vice-president is, Ahmed Ali Kanoo, who man­ages about 1.5 bil­lion dol­lars of the fam­ily for­tune. Among the share­hold­ers we find Sheik Ahmed Zki Yamani, ex min­is­ter of oil of Saudi-Arabia and seven mem­bers of the House of Saud.

Also present in this group is Abdul­lah Taha Bakhsh, con­nected to dif­fer­ent bank frauds. Until Sep­tem­ber 11th 2001 he was rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Saudi Bin Laden group in the U.S. Accord­ing to the prospec­tus of Invest­corp from 1992 the Min­is­ter of Finance of Bahrain is indi­rectly one of the major share­hold­ers through a shell-company.

This is where it gets really inter­est­ing. Abdul­lah Taha Bak­shs, Abdul Rah­man Al-Ateeqi were both impor­tant share­hold­ers in the Bank of Credit and Com­merce Inter­na­tional. The BCCI went down in a sea of scan­dals in the early 90’s. 23 bil­lion dol­lars dis­ap­peared in the hole in 73 coun­tries and still is miss­ing. The Amer­i­can Jus­tice Depart­ment calls BCCI a crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tion under cover of a bank.

The C.I.A. slushed funds through BCCI to the Muja­hedin. This went quite easy because Osama Bin Laden had a few accounts at the BCCI. Ille­gal finance for arms deals with Iraq and Iran were being done at BCCI. Money laun­der­ing for the Esco­bar and Meddelin-cartel all went through BCCI. When the cur­tain fell 1 bil­lion dol­lars worth of loans was booked to a ran­dom col­lec­tion of Kuwaiti from the yel­low pages.

Khalid bin­Mafhouz holds the num­ber 2 slot at Invest­corp with 25% of the shares. He cur­rently is num­ber 210 on the Times rich List. He was mem­ber of the board of BCCI and made a deal with the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment. He paid 225 mil­lion dol­lars for claims, 37 mil­lion dol­lars in lieu of fines and 253 mil­lion dol­lars for claims.

In 2003 it tran­spired that the Bank of Eng­land never stopped the British seat of BCCI though it knew the bank laun­dered money from drugs trade.

For­mer pres­i­dent Manuel Nor­iega, for­mer Pres­i­dent Fer­di­nand Mar­cos, and Sad­dam Hus­sein were among the clien­tele. From com­plaints in South-Korea it is clear that about 120 mem­bers of staff from 33 embassies had put money at the BCCI.

Khalid bin Mafhouz, explains he has finan­cially backed the Muja­hedin in Afghanistan. But then, so did the U.S. It may be use­ful to remind the reader that Osama Bin­laden was one of the lead­ers of the Muja­hedin. Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s brother, has a seat on the exec­u­tive board. . . .